The Wrong Window: Reflections on Empty Images

Published on ArtThrob, 22 April 2020

“That I look to photographs and films in our shared solitude is perhaps unsurprising. Such images, be they still or moving, lend themselves to our newly-confined lives. There are few better ways to commune with photographs than in a book, to sit with them a while, unhurried and undisturbed. As Goldblatt tells Dodd, ‘a book is tangible and that quality is, to me, very important. The tactility. The sensuousness.’ Moving between pages, backwards and forwards, ‘inwards and outwards,’ offers the viewer a more engaged relationship to the images. With Goldblatt and Mofokeng’s books, which are summaries of lifetimes’ work, one moves not only between photographs but through time, from the photographers’ earliest images to their last. As with pictures printed on bound pages, so Gush’s film makes for intimate viewing on the small screen. It is perhaps not its intended form, but being accessible online, one is moved to watch and re-watch it.”

Read the full essay here.